80 Rev. Dr Buckland on the Vitality of 



it has left its tadpole state and emerged from the water, is to 

 seek shelter in holes and crevices of rocks and trees. An indi- 

 vidual, which, when young, may have thus entered a cavity by 

 some very narrow aperture, would find abundance of food by 

 catching insects, which like itself seek shelter within such cavi- 

 ties, and may soon have increased so much in bulk as to render 

 it impossible to go out again, through the narrow aperture at 

 which it entered. A small hole of this kind is very likely to be 

 overlooked by common workmen, who are the only people whose 

 operations on stone and wood disclose cavities in the interior of 

 such substances. In the case of toads, snakes, and lizards, that 

 occasionally issue from stones that are broken in a quarry, or in 

 sinking wells, and sometimes even from strata of coal at the bot- 

 tom of a coal mine, the evidence is never perfect to shew that 

 the reptiles were entirely enclosed in a solid rock ; no examina- 

 tion is ever made until the reptile is first discovered by the 

 breaking of the mass in which it was contained, and then it is 

 too late to ascertain without carefully replacing every fragment 

 (and in no case that I have seen reported has this ever been 

 done) whether or not there was any hole or crevice by which 

 the animal may have entered the cavity from which it was ex- 

 tracted. Without previous examination it is almost impossible 

 to prove that there was no such communication. In the case of 

 rocks near the surface of the earth, and in stone quarries, rep- 

 tiles find ready admission to holes and fissures. We have a no- 

 torious example of this kind in the lizard found in a chalk pit, 

 and brought alive to the late Dr Clarke. In the case also of 

 wells and coal pits, a reptile that had fallen down the well or 

 shaft, and survived its fall, would seek its natural retreat in 

 the first hole or crevice it could find, and the miner dislodging 

 it from this cavity to which his previous attention had not been 

 called, might in ignorance conclude that the animal was coeval 

 with the stone fromwhich he had extracted it. 



It remains only to consider the case, (of which I know not 

 any authenticated example), of toads that have been said to 

 be found in cavities within blocks of limestone to which, on care- 

 ful examination, no access whatever could be discovered, and 

 where the animal was absolutely and entirely closed up with 

 stone. Should any such case ever have existed, it is probable 

 that the communication between this cavity and the external 



